In a graphics system, textures are typically stored in a compressed format in a texture cache. For example, a block compressed format may compress color and alpha for a 4×4 block of pixels into 64 bits (64b; 8 bytes (8B)). After decompression, there is 2B of red, green, and blue (RGB) components with 5, 6, 5 bits per component, respectively. Thus, this compression format achieves a compression factor of 4 (e.g., for a 4×4 blocks of pixels, 2B/pixel*16 pixels)/8B=4).
The compressed format saves on memory requirements as well as the bandwidth required to move the texture between the multiple levels of the memory hierarchy. However, there many drawbacks and limitations associated with conventional texture caching approaches.